Category: Marshall Islands

Two Ebeye men who washed up in the Federated States of Micronesia after six weeks adrift on a powerless boat have made it back to Kwajalein Atoll.

Stepping off Air Marshall Islands’ Dash 8 airliner May 28 on Kwajalein, Godfrey Capelle and Benjamin Thomas became the first people to re-enter the RMI since the imposition of a COVID-19-related RMI.

For nearly 1.5 months, the men’s boat drifted 1,000 miles (880 nautical miles) on a west-southwest heading, passing tantalizingly close to Pohnpei, before luckily washing up May 14 on the remote Namoluk Atoll, 130 miles southeast of Chuuk. Two weeks later, following the RMI government’s decision to repatriate the men, FSM authorities transported Capelle and Thomas to Pohnpei via a patrol vessel, after which the Air Marshall Islands flight brought them to Kwajalein May 28.

But after coming so far, they cannot go home quite yet.  Because the two men washed up in the FSM, one of the few nations along with the RMI to remain free of the coronavirus, Marshall Islands officials allowed the men back into the country, provided they undergo testing for the virus before and after travel from Pohnpei, FSM and also endure a strict 14-day quarantine on Kwajalein. Only after they complete their quarantine can they return to their homes and families on Ebeye.

The risk the fishermen contracted COVID-19 had been low, the RMI Office of the President affirmed in a May 28 statement. But the repatriation of Capelle and Thomas, along with five other RMI citizens who were permitted to take advantage of the AMI flight from the FSM, has provided the Marshall Islands government a rare cohort of people needed to test the quarantine protocols and facilities established on Majuro and Kwajalein. For the time being, these re-entries will be limited exceptions to the ongoing re-entry ban, which was extended on June 5 for another 30 days. The quarantine facilities and the medical and support staff operating them will be essential in prohibiting the transmission of the virus into the atolls of Kwajalein and Majuro and beyond.

• 

• 

• 

• 

Following a protocol developed by USAG-KA and contractor leadership, on May 28 medical staff in full protective gear greeted Capelle, Thomas and fellow Ebeye resident Connielynn Paul, who had also been stranded in Pohnpei. After taking the travelers’ temperatures, the hospital personnel gathered mucus samples for COVID-19 analysis at the hospital’s laboratory, all results of which came back negative. The visitors then began their 14-day isolation period in empty homes set aside as quarantine facilities on Kwajalein.

The threat of contracting the coronavirus has been the least of the men’s worries, however. Having survived nearly 1.5 months in the open Pacific Ocean in a small, powerless skiff, Capelle and Thomas have certainly put the worst behind them. They can endure another two weeks together, on dry land a stone’s throw from their homes and families.

Capelle took a few minutes Thursday to tell a bit of the harrowing story.

————-

It was a routine fishing trip April 2. Capelle, Thomas and a third man on the boat, Junior Joram, who did not survive the ordeal, had punched through SAR Pass and were working their fishing lines when the carburetor in Capelle’s 40-horsepower outboard motor jammed, he said. It was about 3 or 4 p.m., and they were already three miles off the west reef between Kwajalein and Eneobuj. The motor would not restart.

Capelle called for help via his radio at about 5:30 p.m., and within an hour a pair of RMI search and rescue vessels set out to retrieve the men and the 20-foot boat, RMI authorities stated. But by early evening, ushered west by winds gusting between 25 and 35 mph, the men were quickly losing sight of Eneobuj and Kwajalein. When the rescue group on the search vessels finally spotted Capelle’s boat shortly before sundown, the small skiff was already six miles outside SAR Pass, Giff Johnson of the Marshall Islands Journal had reported in April. 

But “I saw the federal boat come close to me,” Capelle said Thursday. “But they never see my light.” The rescuers had actually decided against pursuing the fishermen in the rough seas at night, hoping to resume a wider search the next day in safer conditions. By the next morning, well outside of working range of Capelle’s very high frequency radio, the fishermen were firmly on their way to nowhere in particular.

In the coming days, a crew aboard one of the garrison’s Fairchild Metroliners initiated a search effort west and southwest of Kwajalein. And, per request from the RMI Embassy in Washington, D.C., a U.S. Coast Guard search and rescue team flew out a C-130 from Hawaii to aid in the search effort. But all attempts to locate the blue-and-white-painted 20-foot skiff, and the three Ebeye residents aboard, turned up nothing.

“What I do is just pray,” Capelle said. For weeks, the men held on as aggressive trade winds kicked the boat through 10-foot seas broiling atop five miles of endless blue water. “Sometimes I was scared,” Capelle said. “Sometimes big waves. Big waves. Rain.”

The men still had their fishing gear and were able to catch fish attracted to the boat—the only landmark on the surface for hundreds of miles. They took advantage of seabirds landing on the boat, as well, lunging at them and trapping them with their hands. A quick whack with an oar usually did the trick too, Capelle said. Preparing the birds was unappealing, but they did their best to dry the meat out using the sun’s heat. “After maybe three hours, eat,” he said.

Long days and long nights lied ahead. Passover went by. Then Good Friday and then Easter. “Oh yeah, we pray. Prayed a lot. Every day,” Capelle said, adding that it was his faith in God and his love for his family that kept him going. He also knew if they waited long enough, the trade winds were bound to push them into one of the islands or atolls peppering the ocean surface throughout Micronesia. “I know there is an island,” he said he told himself, Thomas and Joram. “I know plenty island to the southwest.”

On April 19, 2.5 weeks into the odyssey, tragedy struck. It was at about 1 p.m. when a large wave knocked one of the boat paddles into the water, or caused it to fall out of one of the men’s hands, Capelle said. Joram knew it was dangerous to get in the water and leave the boat, but he also knew how important that oar might be to them if they sighted land. “I tell him already if something drops, do not jump into the water,” Capelle said. Joram went after it anyway. He made it to the paddle, “and so he tried to swim the paddle back but can’t. There’s too much waves, wind. We tried to help him, but cannot.”

As the boat drifted away, so did Joram’s chance of surviving. He would never make it back to the boat. “I do not know what happened to him,” Capelle said.

Four days later, around April 23, Capelle and Thomas spotted Pohnpei. The mountainous island was heartbreakingly close—about the distance Ebeye is from Carlos, said Capelle. But the trade winds had nudged his boat just south of its fringing reef, and there was no chance the men could fight the wind and close the distance with only one paddle. “I saw Pohnpei. I tried to go to it, but the wind coming northeast, so I cannot.” 

Another 2.5 weeks of survival at the mercy of the Pacific lied ahead for Capelle and Thomas. The two men sustained themselves on whatever fish, birds and rainwater they could collect. Their friend was gone, and they prayed day in and day out. At night, they looked up at the glittering arms of the Milky Way as the ocean’s black rollers slid them farther from home and hoped to make it off the boat alive.

And then, one day, they did.

On May 12, Capelle and Thomas spotted a couple of low-lying islands in their path. And as if answering their prayers, the wind blew the boat right into the reef’s embrace at about 5 p.m. It was Namoluk Atoll, a pint-sized atoll measuring only three miles long at its widest point and located 130 miles southeast of Chuuk. Only five islands comprise the atoll, and Capelle and Thomas had landed on the reef next to one of the smallest, likely Lukan, on the atoll’s northern periphery.

Asked how he felt Thursday when setting foot on the beach, Capelle was reserved. “I just thanked God and pray,” Capelle said. “I was happy.”

That night on the small island he noticed lights on the larger island, Namoluk, to the west just about a mile away. “I saw the light on the Namoluk. So I said, ‘Oh there’s people there. Tomorrow we go there.’” After sleeping on solid ground for the first time in six weeks, Capelle and Thomas got up and paddled all the way to Namoluk Island, meeting the villagers who would take them in and radio authorities in Chuuk for help.

Capelle and Thomas spent the next two weeks in Chuuk. While the governments of the FSM and RMI figured out how to possibly repatriate the fishermen under the ongoing COVID-19-related travel restrictions and re-entry bans, the men had time to reflect on how fortunate they were to wash up on Namoluk. Had they missed the little atoll, the next possible body of land on Capelle’s and Thomas’ heading—barring currents—would have been a northern province of Indonesia: an additional 1,700 miles of travel and approximately another nine weeks of survival in Capelle’s small boat.

At the time of the publication of this story, Capelle and Thomas are on day nine of their quarantine on Kwajalein. Capelle said he’s pleased with the quality of care he’s receiving from the medical and support staff tasked with monitoring his health and delivering hot meals and other supplies to the men three times per day.

But 62 days after setting out on that ill-fated fishing trip, he can’t wait to get home to Ebeye to see the people he cares about the most.

“I want to see my family and my friends,” he said.

After that? Well, Capelle’s got to provide, he said: “Back to fishing. I will look for another boat.”

A searing sun slides into the horizon, revealing a cavalry of puffy horsehead-shaped clouds marching slowly westward. Carl McGrew, a visitor all too familiar with the iconic cotton-candy-pink sunsets of Kwajalein Atoll, props himself on the mainsail boom of his son’s sailboat, Cherokee, and lets the moment soak in. “How sweet it is,” he says, clasping a cup of icy gin and tonic water.

Between brief, quiet moments of reflection, he tells story after story about his adventures on and off Kwajalein Missile Range, hitting everything from his involvement in the Terminal High Altitude Aerial Defense program, to catching massive marlin with nothing but the head of a mop and fishing line. His presence aboard the boat is one of the reasons I’ve accepted a last-minute invitation to set sail on a short trip to Roi-Namur with him, his son, Paul, and friends and family. If Carl was going, I wanted to go, too. Not only to share his company but also to record a little of the history of the anti-ballistic missile programs in which he was involved.

A retired Army major in the explosive ordnance disposal field, and later a Kwajalein Missile Range operations officer with more than 13 years of service on Kwaj, McGrew helped direct missions on the range through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. These were pivotal times for America’s anti-ballistic missile programs.

McGrew’s assignment as an EOD officer at White Sands Missile Range was one of his earliest forays into the ABM industry.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Western Electric and other contractors hired by the Army Rocket and guided Missile Agency were tasked with developing a viable ABM system, busying themselves with early test launches of the superfast short-range ABM missile called Sprint. McGrew was assigned to EOD support for these missions.

“There were some 45 Sprint missiles launched at White Sands,” he says. “I was able to support some 15 of those there in the early development of the Sprint, since it was a very hot booster system.” Equipped with a small, 1-kiloton thermonuclear warhead, it was designed to intercept ICBMs inside the atmosphere just 15 seconds after launch. In testing, the two-stage missile popped out of its silo via a small explosive piston, after which its first stage ignited and accelerated the vehicle at more than 100Gs to a max speed of Mach 10 in just 10 seconds—so fast the nose cone became incandescent. The missile’s engineering was nearly beyond the state of the art. “They had about a 50 percent success rate just to get [Sprints] out of the silos,” McGrew tells me. But the early testing at White Sands created a stable foundation for engagement and intercept testing at Kwajalein, where McGrew would continue to work with the Sprints and another longer-range missile system called Spartan.

As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, the Nixon administration, the Joint Chiefs and a slim congressional majority supported deployment of these ABM missiles and two families of advanced phased array radars in an ABM arrangement called Safeguard. Centered among the wheat fields outside of Nekoma, North Dakota, construction of the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex was nearly complete, with systems soon coming online, when McGrew, still an Army EOD officer, moved his family to Kwajalein in June 1974. Flight tests of the Safeguard program’s Sprint and Spartan interceptor missiles were launching from Meck and Illeginni at a breakneck rate: roughly one M2-series intercept attempt a month, and the population of Kwaj was more than 6,000, McGrew remembers. He was assigned to Kwajalein Missile Range’s range operations group, working in the building now known as 1010, and he and four officers directed the range’s operations and mission scheduling for the Sprint and Spartan launches. “When Sprint finally arrived at Kwajalein, it was very successful,” he says. “The development program allowed for it to launch from Meck Island and Illeginni. So, Sprint was a very successful, high-performance missile.” Meck was a beehive of activity until the final test shots, Safeguard M2-545 and M2-548, blasted off the pad at Meck the following April, ending this crucial testing period for the Safeguard program.

U.S. Army Safeguard Command activated the Mickelsen Safeguard Complex in North Dakota on Sept. 28, 1975, and only 19 weeks later the Joint Chiefs ordered the site to shut down: The slim congressional majority that had authorized the program years earlier had given way to voices opposed to Safeguard. It was the end of the line for nuclear-armed ABM missiles on American soil. A new phase in the evolution of ABM defenses would soon begin.

“Those programs were very successful,” McGrew says. “But with the [Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty] agreements, those systems were taken off the shelf, and new systems that were less hazardous to nuclear detonations—hence the rise of kinetic kill programs—came online.”

McGrew loved his assignment on Kwajalein and extended his two-year tour to three years. “I loved the environment to raise my kids in, and it was a wise move.” Apart from his work on the missile range, he became an avid scuba diver, organizing Kwajalein Scuba Club trips to Pohnpei and Chuuk. In 1975, he and 29 other Kwajalein divers checked 60 KSC air tanks onto a Continental Airlines flight, paying $5 per tank, and spent two weeks of diving the reefs and wrecks in those Micronesian states.

“We did the same trip again the next year in 1976,” he says. “The scuba club was very active—a lot of divers, and there were never enough tanks.”

In 1977, the Army assigned McGrew to Huntsville, Alabama, where he retired from the Army as a major, completing 20 years of service. It was the beginning of the Pentagon’s studies into methods of destroying incoming ICBMs through blunt impact instead of nuclear explosions: like hitting a bullet with a bullet, the Army says. One of those early studies, begun in 1977, was the Homing Overlay Experiment, and McGrew was brought aboard by Lockheed Corporation to assist. While the Army and its contractor teams performed deep dive studies on improving radar and computer abilities to discriminate enemy warheads—that is, identify warheads from decoys, penetration aids and debris while en route to their targets—the Army also began developing kinetic kill vehicles. By using rocket stages to launch an independently steerable, thruster-powered object guided by infrared optical guidance systems, the idea was that a KKV could collide head-on with a target, destroying it: no nuclear detonation needed.

The HOE project was the start of McGrew’s 18-year stint in KKV development with Lockheed, and the project brought him and his family back to Kwajalein Missile Range for a second tour. In three tests in 1983, the Air Force launched Minuteman ICBMs toward Kwajalein Atoll, and the Army’s HOE interceptors failed in each test to destroy the dummy warhead. “It was a challenging program” that used off-the-shelf technology, essentially, McGrew says. But on June 10, 1984, the date of the fourth and final test, the HOE’s 13-feet-wide umbrella skeleton wrapped the Minuteman re-entry vehicle in a concussive death hug with a closing speed of more than 6 km per second. McGrew and the HOE planners were elated.

“It was the first kinetic kill, and that was the start of Star Wars, according to President Reagan at the time,” McGrew tells me as we sit at anchor off Roi-Namur.

Formally known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars programs blossomed in the coming years, each fixated on different ways to destroy incoming warheads without the use of nuclear explosions. Some were fanciful for their time—think lasers and platforms bursting with KKVs in orbit around Earth—and some were more straightforward. McGrew moved on to a program grounded on past successes, the Exoatmospheric Re-Entry Interceptor Subsystem, which was a direct descendent of the HOE program and designed to kill ICBMs at long range, outside of the Earth’s atmosphere. On Jan. 29, 1991, the ERIS crew launched the 200-kilogram ERIS booster and KKV from Meck and scored a direct hit against a target Minuteman launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. McGrew looks fondly on that achievement: They had proven KKVs might work in the real world. “Fortunately, we were very lucky and got the first round off and also had a first-round kinetic kill hit,” he says, acknowledging the long road kinetic defense programs still had ahead of them.

A second intercept attempt in March 1992 tested the KKV’s ability to discriminate the correct warhead using its onboard infrared sensors but failed to destroy the target missile. Budget constraints forced an end to ERIS testing soon after, but the knowledge the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization gained on infrared seeking, onboard discrimination, KKV vector thrusting and more were transferred directly to the following—and current—generation of exo-atmospheric kinetic ABM systems: the Missile Defense Agency’s Ground-based Midcourse Defense. With 44 Ground-Based Interceptors deployed in silos at Fort Greely, Alaska and Vandenberg, the system is charged with protecting the United States from limited ICBM attacks from adversaries.

McGrew looks back fondly on his involvement in HOE and ERIS and his role in ushering the long-range kinetic system from infancy to deployment.

“We did a lot of work out here,” he told me, staring off at Meck Island as we sailed by. “A lot of important work.”

His favorite program, he later tells me, is THAAD, another kinetic ABM system with roots planted during the Reagan Star Wars years. The theater defense system was borne out of the High Endo-atmospheric Defense Interceptor program and designed to destroy medium- and long-range theater ballistic missiles primarily just inside the atmosphere. THAAD was McGrew’s last assignment with Lockheed. He worked as the mission director for a total of nine launches of the THAAD interceptor at White Sands before later system testing took place on Kwajalein Atoll, Wake Island and elsewhere.

“That was a very successful program,” he says. “And it’s operational now, along with the GBI in Alaska and Vandenberg. So, I’m fortunate to see two programs to their fulfillment, and that was 20 years with Lockheed.

“And it’s good that’s deployed,” he continues. “Because things in Korea and in other places have requirements for that system. And it’s nice to see that the Army is able to activate it and keep the Soldiers trained on it.”

The 13.5 years McGrew spent on Kwajalein Atoll left an indelible impression on him. He’s proud of the roles he had in testing critical ABM systems deployed today, earning many titles though the years. But he’s most proud of calling himself a father, husband and Scoutmaster, he says. Scouting was a way for him to spend time with his family, give back to the community and integrate into the local Marshallese community in ways most people can only imagine now. McGrew and scout leaders from Ebeye would join forces to organize massive, annual Boy Scout jamborees on Bigej, inviting the 500 Marshallese Boy Scouts living on Ebeye and the 30 Kwajalein Boy Scouts for a week-long adventure of cooking pigs in earth ovens and practicing scouting skills.

“Everybody loved to sail, fish and scuba dive,” he says. “But since I was a scout master and had two boys—one became a Life Scout, and one became an Eagle Scout—I enjoyed scouting.”

The fundraisers McGrew helped organize would pull in enough money from the Kwajalein community to send $25,000 checks to the Boy Scout leadership in Honolulu and buy Cadillacs for raffle winners. Yes, Cadillacs for raffle winners on Kwajalein—It was a different time. Other adventures included Boy Scout reef hikes from Ninji to Kwajalein during low-tides, before the causeway from Gugeegue to Ebeye was constructed.

He tells of catching so many marlins that he and his friends employed a clever safer way of continuing to fish them and release them back to the ocean: using the head of a mop, literally. It helps if he explains the quirky technique himself:

“I think I got about 28 marlin up next to the boat. I learned after about 10 of them that it was hard to get the hook out of them and hard to release them. So we went with what is called a mop head technique. You could actually buy a mop at the store and make three lures. And it didn’t have a hook. You just tied the 300-pound line around it and towed it, and it would splash up, and the marlin would hit it. It would hit the mop head like it’s a fish and try to kill it. And its beak would tangle into the mop head getting so tangled up that we were able to reel the marlin in—without a hook. Using that technique, we caught a lot of them safely. The mop head would stay attached to the beak and the big marlins would just walk on top of the water with the mop head behind the boat. The mop head would eventually break down in the water and come off the marlin’s beak. So that was a lesson learned on catching marlin and releasing them.”

A lot has changed on Kwajalein since McGrew first arrived 45 years ago. The Kwajalein Missile Range is now the Reagan Test Site, but it remains a critical test bed for the nation’s missile defense programs, the Air Force’s follow-on test shots of Minuteman III ICBMs and space surveillance and new foreign missile launch tracking. But in the world of missile defense, much of the range activity that kept scientists, engineers and Soldiers busy in earlier decades has moved to other national missile ranges, McGrew says. A population of more than 6,000 in the early 1970s has dropped to just more than 1,000 today. But while budgets are a function of the number of boots on the sand here, enjoying life on Kwaj and Roi is not.

“The lifestyle is the same,” he says. “It’s the most beautiful place to live and raise a family, to enjoy the natural environment to its fullest. It’s great to be able to get these experiences time and time again.”

As Paul motors me away from Cherokee so I can catch a flight back to Kwaj, Carl sits on the stern of the boat, flashes a thumbs up and says goodbye. I remember him saying this might be his last sailing adventure on Kwajalein Atoll. That partly saddens me, but I’m reminded he’s got plenty of other adventures ahead—plus five nights at Nell, the next destination for the Cherokee crew on their trip around the largest atoll in the world.